obituaries – yvonne vera

Index

Daniel Moshenberg and Shereen Essof
Pat Brickhill

“Death has a name which we can carry in the mouth
without dying”: Yvonne Vera

Daniel Moshenberg and Shereen Essof
George Washington University

Thursday, April 7, 2005. A Zimbabwean feminist novelist, activist, artist, storyteller, dies. How does one celebrate the life and works of Yvonne Vera? How does one think through and keep alive her concerns as explored and re-explored through her life work? Concerns that remain even more real, vibrant and urgent given the current Zimbabwean context?

Sunday, April 10, 2005. Washington D.C. Zimbabwean artist Berry Bickle speaks about her art and her work Sarungano, which translates in two Shona dialects to mean both the storyteller and the story told.

Much of the attention paid by those assembled was to the techniques and processes of composition and production of the artwork. This even though Bickle spoke compellingly, if quietly, about the fate of her earlier installation, Say-So, which, when exhibited in Harare in 2002 was condemned by the government. Say-So was an installation piece set up in four parts, three walls and a construction or sculpture between the walls. On wall one, to the left as one faced the installation, were letters to the editor of the Daily News, which was banned in 2003, soon after. On the right hand wall were personal letters and testimonies to daily life in Zimbabwe. The center wall was a blank blackboard on which observers were invited to write … anything. The central construction consisted of a television playing ZBC, the state controlled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Television, in a wheelbarrow; a set of three well-worn suitcases, stacked, on top of which sat a rusty, broken typewriter, mirrored in some way through three similar typewriters suspended above the central black board. The storyteller and the story told. The history of the installation piece would suggest an attempt at story denied.

It is this denial that in some way was at the heart of Vera’s work. Vera insisted on telling those Zimbabwean “stories” that ordinarily, would have been denied. “Those stories” were often women’s stories, they were alternative narratives that challenged mainstream/malestream understandings and constructions of history under the current regime. Vera, in a similar yet different way to Bickle, across the arc of her work from Under the Tongue in 1996 through to The Stone Virgins in 2002, was concerned with the investigation of voice, language and subsequently text. Taking very seriously the relationship between history and memory and challenging what can and cannot be said, what this meant in the everyday lives of women, men and children in colonial Rhodesia and postcolonial Zimbabwe, and what this recasting of history would mean if translated into an agenda for social change.

Last September, in the Guardian, in the lead up to the Booker Prize, South African writer Achmat Dangor saw the potential enrichment of African literature as a matter of taking to the streets. Leading the charge, as it were, was Yvonne Vera: “I have also observed with some relief how other African writers have taken to the streets, as it were. Yvonne Vera beautifully evokes Bulawayo in her novel The Stone Virgins, Moses Isegawa's depiction of Idi Amin's Kampala in Snakepit is heady yet claustrophobic. Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying accurately captures the sprawling, elegiac architecture of peri-urban South Africa. African writers are starting to reclaim the African city from the colonialists who by their association with it had poisoned it as a centre of culture and `dark, gleaming light’.”

Vera’s work was a perpetual claiming and reclaiming of the spaces of everyday life, and in particular of women’s everyday lives. The Stone Virgins, as one example, opens: “Selborne Avenue in Bulawayo cuts from Fort Street (at Charter House), across to Jameson Road (of the Jameson Raid), through to Main Street, to Grey Street, to Abercorn Street, to Fife Street, to Rhodes Street, to Borrow Street, out into the lush Centenary Gardens with their fusion of dahlias, petunias, asters, red salvia, and mauve petrea bushes, onward to the National Museum, on the left side.” It’s all about Selborne Avenue, “the most splendid street in Bulawayo.” To enter Yvonne Vera’s literary world was always to enter the space and time of real places, even in the more fabulous works like Nehanda, which work ironically concerns a historical figure. Women’s spaces and times. Shona women, Ndebele women, `Indian’ women, `coloured’ women, `European’ women. “Rhodesian” women, “Zimbabwean” women, and, as Christine Sylvester has noted, in Producing Women and Progress in Zimbabwe, Zimbabwean “women”, a floating signifier if ever there was one.

Yvonne Vera’s readers had to learn to know, to admire and to revere the ways in which Zimbabwean women live. Note that we do not say survive, for not everyone survives the moment. They live their lives in intense spaces, in the neighborhoods of and surrounding Bulawayo, Kezi, Mubaira, Harare. They live in the cities, townships, locations, and the bush. They struggle with incest, rape, torture, civil war, betrayal, and even peace. And even peace in Zimbabwe cloaks `its women’ in violence. They live the intensities of love, tenderness, forgiveness, and hatred. Though they often seem to stand perfectly still, the women of Yvonne Vera’s works are in constant movement and continuous turbulence. They constitute the flowing waters that can be touched an infinite number of times and only once.

The characters in Vera’s work occupy time. They live in real material historical time, marked in years. Mazvita’s story of struggle against circumstance and betrayal, personal and collective, in Without a Name, is cadenced by the invocation of 1977: “After all it was 1977” (22). “It was 1977, freedom was skin deep but joyous and tantalizing” (32). “The streets smelled of burning skin. Nyore Nyore. It was like that in 1977” (33). “The city pushed forward. It was 1977. It was nothing to see a woman with a blind stare on her face, with a baby fixed spidery on her back. It was nothing to be sorrowful” (43). “Freedom was a thought tantalizing and personal. You had to wear your own freedom to be sure it had arrived. 1977. That is how it was expressed. People walked into shops and bought revolutions” (55). “The carnival was necessary and complete, so they lay in the dead bodies which they had rejected in the heightening clamor of the voices of their men, in the turmoil of faint-hearted whispers. The year was 1977” (72). “1977. People were known to die amazing deaths. Natural deaths were rare, unless one simply died in sleep. . . . 1977. It was a time for miracles. If you arrived at your destination still living, then you prayed desperately to continue to live” (87). “1977. Everyone was an accomplice to war” (88).

And how does Without a Name end? The last chapter loops around the simple incantatory statement: “It is yesterday”. “It is yesterday. The trees are heavy with pod” (114). “It is yesterday. Mazvita sees the smoke and hills” (115). “It is yesterday. The village has disappeared” (116). In the end, “the silence is deep, hollow, and lonely” (116).

It is 1977. It is yesterday. All of Vera’s people, in particular all of Vera’s women, live in real time and real places, in Zimbabwe. In one book, it is 1977; in another, Under the Tongue, it is 1980, “the end of loneliness and unfulfilled desire long kept” (232), “a time to shorten distances to desire” (233). In Yvonne Vera’s work, it’s always yesterday, it’s always today, it’s always the moment in which women refuse the offers of patience and the supposed rewards of silence as acceptance. Yvonne Vera offers her readers the courage, the full heart, of deliverance, deliverance understood not as deliverance from, as flight, but as deliverance into. Deliverance is the final word of The Stone Virgins, her fifth and as it turns out final completed novel. Who today is writing the story of Zimbabwe, and of “its women”, the story that keeps whispering, “It is 2005”, and how will it end?

For this is the challenge. Under a broader lens, how will it end in a world that in so many ways negates the meaning of postcolonial Zimbabwe. A world that refuses to hear Zimbabwe’s women and to see and read the challenges facing Zimbabwe for what they are. As a Zimbabwean writer, this invitation is threaded through Vera’s work. To read her work is to confront and act upon the challenges and take up the invitation. Or at the very least to re-look and re-think. It is 2005 and how will it end?

In 2003, Irene Staunton published Writing Still: New stories from Zimbabwe, in which appears Yvonne Vera’s last published story, “Sorting It Out”. It is a short story, as dazed and circular as Zimbabwe’s history. It begins: “`A woman who cannot forgive her husband’s infidelity can climb the highest tree in her village and drop her infant to the ground.’ I hear my grandmother say” (237). It ends: “A woman must forgive the infidelity of her husband in order to save her children” (242). It is yesterday, it is 2005, women and unfaithful husbands and saved children abide within a realm of necessary forgiveness.

Hamba kahle Yvonne, hamba kahle.

© Daniel Moshenberg and Shereen Essof

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Yvonne Vera

Pat Brickhill

On Monday morning I sat down at my desk and checked my emails. The first I opened from a fellow Zimbabwean, Diana Mitchell, told of the death of Yvonne Vera. Stunned into silence and sitting in a grey and foreign land I immediately allowed my thoughts to travel back to my first meeting with her first at a book launch in downtown Harare. It was a small gathering for at the time she was still a fledgling writer. The venue was Ndoro Trading - full or beautiful African crafts and cloth. Yvonne looked arty and African in a serene way. I had gone to pass on greetings and congratulations from a mutual friend. We spoke for a while and I congratulated her on her book, spontaneously she hugged me and put me at my rest and seemed happy and relaxed.

One could not but held feel awe in her presence. Yvonne Vera was regarded by many as almost a female equivalent of Dambudzo Marechera. She explored taboo subjects with a breathtaking honesty that was sometimes disturbing and unsettling. She was not afraid to express her views - or if she felt she had been wronged or slighted she would have no hesitation in defending herself. She could be both incredibly warm and terrifyingly intimidating!

Her first book was Why Don't You Carve Animals (1992) but it would take the publishing of Nehanda (1993) to place her under a spotlight would she would not leave until her death at a tragically young age on 10 April 2005. Gregory Gipson ('Mutable Semantics: Three Texts and the Term Postcolonial' in English 27, Autumn 1997, see http:www.//landow.stg.brown.edu/post/poldiscourse/gipson4.html) described this pioneering work as the creation of a myth and 'addressing the issues of tribalism and nationhood so critical to Africa's decolonized peoples' He saw Yvonne as creating 'a culture hero for several cultures', to be the "wind" that "covers the earth with joyful celebration" (Vera, 118).

I remember Yvonne at the Gottenberg Book Fair in Sweden where she travelled to receive the Voice of Africa Award in 1999. She was the first recipient of this award initiated to honour Swedish author Henning Mankell, by his publishing house. At the time Chirikuri Chirikuri, Spike Gaura, Sindiwa Magona and myself were at the book fair to promote the Zimbabwe International Book Fair and appointed ourselves her unofficial fan club. Yvonne addressed two meetings. At the first Spike and I arrived late with Margaret Ling. We tried to slip in quietly but Yvonne immediately stopped at greeted us warmly as fellow Africans - not to embarrass us but more to draw us close to her. We sat in a semi-circle as she read from her novels. The room hushed as in her quietly moving and measured voice her words came alive. She invited us to attend a supper given in her honour and we spent a lovely evenings eating prawns in a sisterhood which is hard to recapture in this article.

Yvonne wore her hair in dreadlocks - one of the first prominent women to do so. She always looked stunning and dressed beautifully and dramatically at the same time - a cloth around her shoulders, a beautiful mud print shirt, a Ghanaian style scarf - always a glorious celebration of her African womanhood. But at times the burden of the books she created weighed heavily on her. She was emotionally vulnerable. At a later meeting, a larger gathering, several questioners tried to draw her out on the subjects she chose to write about. They pressed her to say whether she was writing from a personal perspective - but Yvonne would not be drawn and instead retreated into herself.

I met Yvonne several times during my time at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. When she addressed the ZIBF Indaba with a presentation that stunned the international gatherings, her descriptions of the plight of some children reduced members of the audience to tears. Although we managed to find a tape of her presentation she would not allow us to transcribe it and reproduce it in our Indaba book. It was almost as if her words were too fragile to be said again and no amount of pleading would change her mind. Yvonne saw herself very much as a voice for those whose voices had been quietened by the cruelty and harshness of life.

Although her unpredictability and sensitiveness was sometimes unnerving and difficult to respond to, Yvonne was never unapproachable. She agreed without hesitation to speak at a Zimbabwe Women Writers function at the Book Café - even though there were many more prestigious demands on her time. But if she decided she did not want to do something it made no difference how important the gathering was - she would not budge.

Yvonne breathed fresh life and a sense of pride into the National Gallery in Bulawayo. She developed the Gallery into a space were all felt at home and where historically disposed people reclaimed ownership of their art, their music and their culture. I remember in particular her Exhibition of Township Photographs from the 50's where the Cool Crooners helped open the Exhibition with a warmth and style that was distinctly African - and warmly 'Skies'. She had an amazing capacity for knowing and understanding people but was always hardest on herself. Yvonne was very much a writers writer and an artiste in the fullest sense of the word.

To her husband, mother, family and friends, to Irene Staunton a confidante, and to all who knew and loved her I extend my sympathy. Her loss seems to highlight the tragedy Zimbabwe continues to experience and I cannot imagine being home and her not being there.

Pat Brickhill is a writer and administrator who worked for the Zimbabwe International Book Fair from 1993 to 1999.

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